Quality of software reference architectures

The growing complexity of information systems increases the importance of paying significantly attention to their architectures. This paper distinguishes between concrete software architectures and software reference architectures. A reference architecture is defined as a generic architecture for a class of software systems that is used as a foundation for the design of concrete architectures. With respect to concrete software architectures several evaluation methods exist, for example the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). These methods evaluate in particular system quality attributes. Architectural qualities, i.e. reflecting the quality of the architecture itself, are hardly addressed. This paper investigates the architectural qualities of reference architectures. We present a set of extensions for an architecture evaluation method in order to evaluate the quality of a reference architecture. The set of extensions is validated in a case study